Pop Loser No. 101: the One Where I Am Reminded (Again) That I Do Not Understand Money

A newsletter of innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair collected and written by @poploser.

No open this week, just a quick housekeeping note: I’ve got a deadline for book edits in about a week and a half, so expect this thing not to show up next week and possibly the week after. Apologies in advance. This is just going to be a thing that happens until May. And if you think that’s rough, wait until every issue for six months screams “HEY, DID YOU BUY MY BOOK YET?” Apologies for that, too.

Remember two weeks ago when I linked to a Guardian piece about the problems with YouTube’s algorithms? Yeah. They are still shitty.

It was not the first time that YouTube had served not just as a source of fringe conspiracy theories, but as an accomplice in their rapid spread.

After the massacre in Las Vegas last October, YouTubers filled a void of information about the killer’s motives with dark speculation, crowding the site with videos that were fonts of discredited and unproven information, including claims that the tragedy had been staged.

Expecting the internet to keep our archives safe isn’t a great strategy.

In the 21st century, more and more information is “born digital” and will stay that way, prone to decay or disappearance as servers, software, Web technologies, and computer languages break down. The task of internet archivists has developed a significance far beyond what anyone could have imagined in 2001, when the Internet Archive first cranked up the Wayback Machine and began collecting Web pages; the site now holds more than 30 petabytes of data dating back to 1996. (One gigabyte would hold the equivalent of 30 feet of books on a shelf; a petabyte is a million of those.) Not infrequently, the Wayback Machine and other large digital archives, such as those in the care of the great national and academic libraries, find themselves holding the only extant copy of a given work on the public internet. This responsibility is increasingly fraught with political, cultural, and even legal complications.

Nav on why the should-we-or-shouldn’t-we debate around phones is stupid.

Just as it makes little sense to criticize books or TV themselves as forms—it instead being far more sensible to critique individual books, shows, or trends—criticizing “phone addiction” can’t account for both the enormous variety of what we use phones for, or how the situation and mental state in which we use them can drastically change the effects of using them. The problem isn’t phones, it’s the context in which they are used—and that context is often deeply personal.

Google is going to start blocking shitty ads by default. Presumably this doesn’t include their own shitty ads.

But even if Chrome never blocks ads on a page you visit, Google’s move has already affected the web. The company notified sites in advance that they would be subject to the filtering, and 42 percent made preemptive changes, the spokesperson says, including Forbes, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and In Touch Weekly.

Google also wants to add AMP to email. This is a terrible, bad, awful idea.

People leave Gmail all the time to go to airline webpages, online shops, social media, and other places. Places that have created their own user environments, with their own analytics, their own processes that may or may not be beneficial or even visible to Google. Can’t have that!

But if these everyday tasks take place inside Gmail, Google exerts control over the intimate details, defining what other companies can and can’t do inside the email system — rather than using the natural limitations of email, which I hasten to reiterate are a feature, not a bug.

The Snapchat parent’s shares sank as much as 7.2 percent Thursday, wiping out $1.3 billion in market value, on the heels of a tweet from Kylie Jenner, who said she doesn’t open the app anymore. Whether it’s the demands of her newfound motherhood, or the recent app redesign, the testament drew similar replies from her 24.5 million followers. Wall Street analysts too, have begun to notice, citing recent user engagement trends noticed since the platform’s redesign.

By far the biggest change made by Medium is the addition of a section called “Related Content,” which reads “We do not allow posts or accounts that engage in on-platform, off-platform, or cross-platform campaigns of targeting, harassment, hate speech, violence, or disinformation. We may consider off-platform actions in assessing a Medium account, and restrict access or availability to that account.”

The Twilight Zone’s most prevalent themes are probably best distilled as “you are not what you took yourself to be,” “you are not where you thought you were,” and “beneath the façade of mundane American society lurks a cavalcade of monsters, clones, and robots.”